This man, a crock in every sense, hurrying back to help his country, symbolised for every American aboard the unconquerable courage of Great Britain.  If you hadn’t the full measure of years to give, give what was left, even though it were but six months.  I may add that in England his services were accepted.  His persistence refused to be disregarded.  When red-tape stopped his progress, he used back-stairs strategy.  No one could bar him from his chance of serving.

In believing that he represented the Empire at its best, my Americans were not mistaken.  There are thousands fighting to-day who share his example.  One is an ex-champion sculler of Oxford; even in those days he was blind as a bat.  His subsequent performance is consistent with his record; we always knew that he had guts.  At the start of the war, he tried to enlist and was turned down on the score of eyesight.  He tried four times with no better result.  The fifth time he presented himself he was fool-proof; he had learnt the eyesight tests by heart.  He went out a year ago as a “one pip artist”—­a second lieutenant.  Within ten months he had become a captain and was acting lieutenant-colonel of his battalion, all the other officers having been killed or wounded.  At Cambrai he did such gallant work that he was personally congratulated by the general of his division.  These American officers had heard such stories; they regarded England with a kind of worship.  As men who hoped to be brave but were untested, they found something mystic and well-nigh incredible in such utter courage.  The consumptive racing across the Atlantic that he might do something for England before death took him, made this spirit real to them.

We travelled to London as a party and there for a time we held together.  The night before several set out for France, we had a farewell gathering.  The consumptive, who had just obtained his commission, was in particularly high feather; he brought with him a friend, a civilian official in the Foreign Office.  Please picture the group:  all men who had come from distant parts of the world to do one job; men in the army, navy, and flying service; every one in uniform except the stranger.

Talk developed along the line of our absolute certainty as to complete and final victory.  The civilian stranger commenced to raise his voice in dissent.  We disputed his statements.  He then set to work to run through the entire argument of pessimism:  America was too far away to be effective; Russia was collapsing; France was exhausted; England had reached the zenith of her endeavour; Italy was not united in purpose.  On every front he saw a black cloud rising and took a dyspeptic’s delight in describing it as a little blacker than he saw it.  There was an apostolic zeal about the man’s dreary earnestness.  He spoke with that air of authority which is not uncommon with civilian Government officials.  The Americans stared rather than listened; this was not the mystic and utter courage which they had expected to find well-nigh incredible.  Their own passion far out-topped it.